Donna McGettigan (Clare, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is the possibility of hundreds of children having had unnecessary surgery for hip dysplasia just in the period 2021 to 2023. That is hundreds of children who were put through the pain of surgery and the difficulty of recovery. Hundreds of sets of parents, guardians and wider families who were put through the anxiety of having their child operated on. They had to watch their children suffering and they now find out that it may all have been unnecessary. It must add further heartbreak on top of what they have already endured. Many parents sought second opinions, and then these cases were diagnosed as being incorrect. These cases may just prove to be a snapshot of a wider problem. The scale of this and similar scandals is likely to be far greater than has been revealed so far. There may be thousands of children who have been operated on unnecessarily.

The Government should change the terms of reference of the inquiry to allow for the investigation of cases far earlier than 2021. These were life-altering surgeries carried out on vulnerable children, with parents who put their faith in the so-called medical professionals cruelly manipulated and betrayed, and not in one hospital but in Cappagh, Temple Street and Crumlin. Where were the oversight, scrutiny and accountability? It is appalling that there were no supervision mechanisms capable of uncovering this and putting in place effective measures to bring the practice to an end. It fell to a whistleblower to make a protected disclosure. Even then, the Government response was slow and marked by empty promises and hollow reassurances. According to media reports, there were concerns among hospital staff for years. What did previous Governments know, and when? The families deserve answers, and we demand them.

Parents whose children actually require surgery must be terrified that they may be putting them through operations they do not require. Trust has been squandered or lost. Rebuilding that trust will be a monumental task. It must start with full disclosure and real accountability. We all need assurances that the full scale of this scandal will be disclosed, that all parents whose children were involved will be informed and that sufficient oversight mechanisms will be put in place to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again. There have been too many medical scandals already, whether it was the CervicalCheck crisis, when my party's warnings were ignored with disastrous consequences for hundreds of women and unbearable stress and worry for many more, or the scandal involving spinal springs, to give just two examples. When the latter scandal in Temple Street hospital was revealed, we were told system failures were to blame. That cannot be the case this time. We must see real accountability and real reform of the oversight systems and mechanisms in order that something like this can never happen again. Currently, it is hard to have any confidence in this regard.

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